Indigenous Studies
Haymarket Books proudly brings back into print Winona LaDuke's seminal work of Native resistance to oppression.
This thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community.
Winona LaDuke was named by Time in 1994 as one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty. In 1996 and 2000, LaDuke served as Ralph Nader's vice presidential running mate in the Green Party.
Unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about Native Americans In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as: "Columbus Discovered America"
"Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims"
"Indians Were Savage and Warlike"
"Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians"
"The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide"
"Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans"
"Most Indians Are on Government Welfare"
"Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich"
"Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol" Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, "All the Real Indians Died Off" challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.
"Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims"
"Indians Were Savage and Warlike"
"Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians"
"The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide"
"Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans"
"Most Indians Are on Government Welfare"
"Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich"
"Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol" Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, "All the Real Indians Died Off" challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.
Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, standalone musings into a memoir that stares down colonialism while chastising hipsters for abusing pumpkin spice. She explains why she doesn’t like pussy hats, mercilessly dismantles pretendians, and confesses her own struggles with white-bread privilege.
Midge ponders Standing Rock, feminism, and a tweeting president, all while exploring her own complex identity and the loss of her mother. Employing humor as an act of resistance, these slices of life and matchless takes on urban-indigenous identity disrupt the colonial narrative and provide commentary on popular culture, media, feminism, and the complications of identity, race, and politics.
Since 1953, the American Indian Center of Chicago has hosted an annual powwow. The powwow is the centerpiece of contemporary Indian culture. It is how Native Americans celebrate traditional values and share their culture with a wider audience. The powwow is a place to make and rekindle friendships. It offers an opportunity to reaffirm traditional values and a chance to reconnect with family, friends, and the greater community. It is a celebration of artistic and cultural traditions, and a way of transmitting those traditions to a younger generation. Through an extensive collection of representative images, Chicago s 50 Years of Powwows chronicles the exciting history and traditions of the powwow."
In the decades since the passing of the Pamajewon ruling in Canada and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in the United States, gaming has come to play a crucial role in how Indigenous peoples are represented and read by both Indians and non-Indians alike. This collection presents a transnational examination of North American gaming and considers the role Indigenous artists and scholars play in producing depictions of Indigenous gambling. In an effort to offer a more complete and nuanced picture of Indigenous gaming in terms of sign and strategy than currently exists in academia or the general public, Gambling on Authenticity crosses both disciplinary and geographic boundaries. The case studies presented offer a historically and politically nuanced analysis of gaming that collectively creates an interdisciplinary reading of gaming informed by both the social sciences and the humanities. A great tool for the classroom, Gambling on Authenticity works to illuminate the not-so-new Indian being formed in the public's consciousness by and through gaming.
In the decades since the passing of the Pamajewon ruling in Canada and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in the United States, gaming has come to play a crucial role in how Indigenous peoples are represented and read by both Indians and non-Indians alike. This collection presents a transnational examination of North American gaming and considers the role Indigenous artists and scholars play in producing depictions of Indigenous gambling. In an effort to offer a more complete and nuanced picture of Indigenous gaming in terms of sign and strategy than currently exists in academia or the general public, Gambling on Authenticity crosses both disciplinary and geographic boundaries. The case studies presented offer a historically and politically nuanced analysis of gaming that collectively creates an interdisciplinary reading of gaming informed by both the social sciences and the humanities. A great tool for the classroom, Gambling on Authenticity works to illuminate the not-so-new Indian being formed in the public's consciousness by and through gaming.
According to traditional Cheyenne belief, shields are living, spirit-filled beings, radiating supernatural power from the Supreme Being for protection and blessing. Shields stand at the nexus of several dimensions of Cheyenne culture, including spirituality, warfare, and artistic expression.
From 1902 to 1906, fifty Cheyenne elders spoke with famed ethnologist James Mooney, sharing with him their interpretations of shield and tipi heraldry. Mooney's handwritten field notes of these conversations are the single best source of information on Plains Native shields and tipi art available and are a source of inestimable value today for both the Cheyennes and for scholars.
In 1955, with the blessing and permission of the Keepers of the Two Great Covenants and the Chiefs and Headmen of the Northern and Southern Cheyenne People, Father Peter J. Powell began a five-decade effort to help preserve the religion, culture, and history of the Cheyenne People for the generations ahead. His transcriptions and annotations of Mooney's notes on Cheyenne heraldry is the culmination of these efforts. This two-volume set features nearly 150 color illustrations as well as more than 50 black and white photographs.
The Laughing People, translated from the award-winning Le peuple rieur, conveys the richness and resilience of the Innu while reminding us of the forces - old and new - that threaten their community. This memoir and tribute tells the tale of the very long journey of a very small nation, recounting both its joie de vivre and its crosses borne. Readers follow Serge Bouchard, a young anthropologist in the 1970s, as he arrives in Ekuanitshit (Mingan, Quebec) and comes to know its residents. His observations and questions document a community weathering yet another season of change - skidoos replace dogsleds and forests are bulldozed for prefabricated housing - while nonetheless defying external pressures to assimilate or disappear altogether. Returning to these texts fifty years later, Bouchard moves beyond platitudes of strength and dives into wide-scale injustices to present the sacrifices and beauty of the Innu people on individual terms. Whether recounting the impact of the residential school system on Georges Mestokosho, the wave of Innu activism inspired by An Antane Kapesh, or the uncelebrated work of women like Nishapet Enim, The Laughing People presents an opportunity for readers to be part of the preservation and proliferation of these important stories.
The Laughing People, translated from the award-winning Le peuple rieur, conveys the richness and resilience of the Innu while reminding us of the forces – old and new – that threaten their community. This memoir and tribute tells the tale of the very long journey of a very small nation, recounting both its joie de vivre and its crosses borne.
Readers follow Serge Bouchard, a young anthropologist in the 1970s, as he arrives in Ekuanitshit (Mingan, Quebec) and comes to know its residents. His observations and questions document a community weathering yet another season of change – skidoos replace dogsleds and forests are bulldozed for prefabricated housing – while nonetheless defying external pressures to assimilate or disappear altogether. Returning to these texts fifty years later, Bouchard moves beyond platitudes of strength and dives into wide-scale injustices to present the sacrifices and beauty of the Innu people on individual terms.
Whether recounting the impact of the residential school system on Georges Mestokosho, the wave of Innu activism inspired by An Antane Kapesh, or the uncelebrated work of women like Nishapet Enim, The Laughing People presents an opportunity for readers to be part of the preservation and proliferation of these important stories.
Is Cree really the sexiest of all languages? Do Native people have less or more public hair? Does Inuit sex have a dark side? These are some of the questions answered in this witty, thoughtful collection. Twelve important voices in the Native culture -- including Joseph Boyden, author of Three Day Road, and Marissa Crazytrain, a descendant of Chief Sitting Bull -- tackle a variety of previously taboo subjects with humor and insight. Noted comic writer and editor Drew Hayden Taylor wraps it up with an original contribution of his own.
This well-researched book provides details of the varied steps that certain groups of Native Americans have used to express their dance ideas - from skips, jumps, and hop steps, to an Indian form of the pas de bourrée. Similarities to Oriental dances, classical ballet, Spanish and Russian variants, and steps in other dance forms are also considered. Examples are given of Indian dance music, words, and descriptive sounds that accompany this music, and the choreography of certain typical Indian dances of the Southwest. Authentic illustrations by a Native American artist depict dancers, while outline figures characterize steps and postures. An inportant addition to the libraries of anthropologists and students of Native American culture, this classic will be invaluable to ethnomusicologists and choreographers.
Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes.
In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful--and problematic--scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the "markers" that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.
TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today's science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: "in our blood" is giving way to "in our DNA." This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously--and permanently--undermined.